Father of computer science decoded nature’s mysterious patterns

Many have heard of Alan Turing, the mathematician and logician who invented modern computing in 1935. They know Turing as the cryptologist who cracked the Nazi Enigma code. And they remember him as a martyr for gay rights who, after being prosecuted and sentenced to chemical castration, died by suicide in 1954. But few have heard of Turing, the naturalist. Nearly half a century after he published his final paper in 1952, chemists and biological mathematicians came to appreciate the power of his work to explain problems they were solving, like how zebrafish get their stripes or cheetahs get spots. Most recently, chemical engineers in China used pattern generation described by Turing to explain a more efficient process for water desalination to provide freshwater in arid places. Turing did not explicitly address the filtering of saltwater. Instead, he used chemistry to explain how undifferentiated balls of cells generated form in organisms. Turing had told a friend that he wanted to defeat Argument From Design — the idea that for complex patterns to exist in nature, something supernatural, like God, had to create them. “He certainly was no militant atheist,” said Jonathan Swinton, a computational biologist and visiting professor at the University of Oxford. “He just thought mathematics was very powerful, and you could use it to explain lots and lots of things — and you should try.” And try Turing did. He noticed that many plants contained clues that math might be involved. Some plant traits emerged as Fibonacci numbers…. [Read full story]